Mainframe Optimization

Optimization starts out with gathering data about what to optimize. SMT Data’s IT Business Intelligence (ITBI™) solution is built for this!

Large IT installations have a wealth of data about capacity and performance but often struggle to create value from this data. Successful optimization requires tools that create transparency – combined with people and processes focused on cost-hunting. A flexible data warehouse to manage the data and result oriented reporting and analysis tools are a must. It may also be important to enrich the technical data with cost and organizational information in order to understand ‘who is using what and for how much’.

SMT Data’s IT Business Intelligence (ITBI™) solution is built for this. The solution has in the last 30 years supported mainframe optimization in large installations all over the world.

Optimization is an iterative process, getting you closer and closer to an optimal configuration. A concentrated one-off effort can result in significant savings, but ensuring that optimization is an ongoing discipline is even more beneficial and ensures sustainability of savings.

SMT Data, and SMT Data’s partners, can provide both the tools and the consulting assistance required to ensure that your mainframe optimization efforts are successful.

With ITBI Business Intelligence reporting, the data from the ITBI Capacity & Performance Data Lake are stored into an SQL server warehouse out of which Data Cubes are generated. Custom BI reports are built on top of the standard data available in the cubes.

ITBI Business Intelligence contains more than four hundred standard reports. These reports have been developed over more than thirty years in a tight collaboration with ITBI customers and cover a broad range of topics related to the customer’s IT-infrastructure. This means that most of the reporting needs of most customers, are fulfilled by ITBI Standard Reports out-of the-box. In addition to the standard reports, customers can easily create additional own reports.

This creates immediate value by identifying capacity, performance and demand optimization potential.

It is not uncommon for ITBI to immediately identify ‘low-hanging fruit’ resulting in 10-15% savings.

Business mapping and cost allocation transform technical data into business actionable insights.

The technical dimensions such as LPAR, job or transaction names can be mapped to business dimensions such as the organizational unit owning that component or the application to which it belongs – or preferably to both. This mapping can often be extracted through existing naming conventions with very little effort. A complete mapping of all units of work is not needed. As with everything else in optimization, the focus is on understanding the units of work with the highest costs. The technical measurements can also be enriched with cost information such as a cost per MSU, MIPS, or CPU seconds (or cost per TB of disk space). Business mapping and cost mapping makes the stored information understandable in all areas and on all levels of the organization, while reports specifically created for and directed to very different recipients all share the same data source (resulting in ‘one truth’).

With the right tools, organization and processes, and with a relatively small amount of time and effort, optimization can save a large IT organization millions of euro a year.